Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioral Economics

Richard H. Thaler has spent his career studying the radical notion that the central agents in the economy are humans - predictable, error-prone individuals. Misbehaving is his arresting, frequently hilarious account of the struggle to bring an academic discipline back down to earth - and change the way we think about economics, ourselves, and our world.

Superforcasting: The Art and Science of Prediction

Everyone would benefit from seeing further into the future, whether buying stocks, crafting policy, launching a new product, or simply planning the week's meals. Unfortunately, people tend to be terrible forecasters. As Wharton professor Philip Tetlock showed in a landmark 2005 study, even experts' predictions are only slightly better than chance. However, an important and underreported conclusion of that study was that some experts do have real foresight.

Other People's Money: The Real Business of Finance

The finance sector of Western economies is too large and attracts too many of the smartest college graduates. Financialization over the past three decades has created a structure that lacks resilience and supports absurd volumes of trading. The finance sector devotes too little attention to the search for new investment opportunities and the stewardship of existing ones, and far too much to secondary-market dealing in existing assets. Regulation has contributed more to the problems than the solutions.

The End of Alchemy: Money, Banking and the Future of the Global Economy

The past 20 years saw unprecedented growth and stability followed by the worst financial crisis the industrialised world has ever witnessed. In the space of little more than a year, what had been seen as the age of wisdom was viewed as the age of foolishness. Almost overnight, belief turned into incredulity. Most accounts of the recent crisis focus on the symptoms and not the underlying causes of what went wrong.

N. Dwyer says:"Whether you agree with the author or not it's an excellent book"

The New Confessions of an Economic Hit Man

The previous edition of this now-classic book revealed the existence and subversive manipulations of "economic hit men". John Perkins wrote that economic hit men (EHM) "are highly paid professionals who cheat countries around the globe out of trillions of dollars. Their tools include fraudulent financial reports, rigged elections, payoffs, extortion, sex, and murder".

And the Weak Suffer What They Must?: Europe, Austerity and the Threat to Global Stability

In 2008, the universe of Western finance outgrew planet Earth. When Wall Street imploded, a death embrace between insolvent banks and bankrupt states consumed Europe. Half a dozen national economies imploded, and several more came close. But the storm is far from over.... From the aftermath of the Second World War to the present, Varoufakis recounts how the eurozone emerged not as a route to shared prosperity but as a pyramid scheme of debt.

The Daily Stoic: 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living

Why have history's greatest minds - from George Washington to Frederick the Great to Ralph Waldo Emerson along with today's top performers, from Super Bowl-winning football coaches to CEOs and celebrities - embraced the wisdom of the ancient Stoics? Because they realize that the most valuable wisdom is timeless and that philosophy is for living a better life, not a classroom exercise. The Daily Stoic offers a daily devotional of Stoic insights and exercises, featuring all-new translations.

Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance

Why do naturally talented people frequently fail to reach their potential while other far less gifted individuals go on to achieve amazing things? The secret to outstanding achievement is not talent but a passionate persistence. In other words, grit. MacArthur Genius Award-winning psychologist Angela Duckworth shares fascinating new revelations about who succeeds in life and why.

The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living Since the Civil War

In the century after the Civil War, an economic revolution improved the American standard of living in ways previously unimaginable. Electric lighting, indoor plumbing, home appliances, motor vehicles, air travel, air conditioning, and television transformed households and workplaces. With medical advances, life expectancy between 1870 and 1970 grew from 45 to 72 years. The Rise and Fall of American Growth provides an in-depth account of this momentous era.

The Confidence Game: The Psychology of the Con and Why We Fall for It Every Time

Con men are artists of persuasion and exploiters of trust. They hold a deep, enigmatic fascination for us. But how do they do it? Whether it's a suspicious-looking email or a multimillion-dollar global swindle, Maria Konnikova investigates the psychological principles that underlie each stage of the confidence game and the profile of both the con artist and his mark.

Amazon Customer says:"Great book for anyone who wants to understand con "

Leadership BS: Fixing Workplaces and Careers One Truth at a Time

In Leadership BS Jeffrey Pfeffer shines a bright light on the leadership industry, showing why it's failing and how it might be remade. He sets the record straight on the oft-made prescriptions for leaders to be honest, authentic, and modest; tell the truth; build trust; and take care of others. By calling BS on so many of the stories and myths of leadership, he gives people a more scientific look at the evidence and better information to guide their careers.

Chronicles: On Our Troubled Times

Penguin presents the unabridged, downloadable audiobook edition of Chronicles: On Our Troubled Times by Thomas Piketty, narrated by Charlie Anson. The return of the best-selling, award-winning economist extraordinaire. With the same powerful evidence and range of reference as his global best seller Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Chronicles sets out Thomas Piketty's analysis of the financial crisis, what has happened since and where we should go from here.

Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty

Brilliant and engagingly written, Why Nations Fail answers the question that has stumped the experts for centuries: Why are some nations rich and others poor, divided by wealth and poverty, health and sickness, food and famine?

The Future of the Professions: How Technology Will Transform the Work of Human Experts

This book predicts the decline of today's professions and describes the people and systems that will replace them. In an Internet society, according to Richard Susskind and Daniel Susskind, we will neither need nor want doctors, teachers, accountants, architects, the clergy, consultants, lawyers, and many others to work as they did in the 20th century.

Naked Statistics: Stripping the Dread from the Data

From batting averages and political polls to game shows and medical research, the real-world application of statistics continues to grow by leaps and bounds. How can we catch schools that cheat on standardized tests? How does Netflix know which movies you'll like? What is causing the rising incidence of autism? As best-selling author Charles Wheelan shows us in Naked Statistics, the right data and a few well-chosen statistical tools can help us answer these questions and more.

PostCapitalism: A Guide to Our Future

From Paul Mason, the award-winning Channel 4 presenter, PostCapitalism is a guide to our era of seismic economic change and how we can build a more equal society. Over the past two centuries or so, capitalism has undergone continual change - economic cycles that lurch from boom to bust - and has always emerged transformed and strengthened. Surveying this turbulent history, Paul Mason wonders whether today we are on the brink of a change so big, so profound, that this time capitalism itself has reached its limits.

Capital in the Twenty-First Century

What are the grand dynamics that drive the accumulation and distribution of capital? Questions about the long-term evolution of inequality, the concentration of wealth, and the prospects for economic growth lie at the heart of political economy. But satisfactory answers have been hard to find for lack of adequate data and clear guiding theories. In Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Thomas Piketty analyzes a unique collection of data from 20 countries, ranging as far back as the 18th century, to uncover key economic and social patterns.

It's All in Your Head: Stories from the Frontline of Psychosomatic Illness

Pauline first became ill when she was 15. What seemed to be a urinary infection became joint pain, then life-threatening appendicitis. After a routine operation, Pauline lost all the strength in her legs. Shortly afterwards, convulsions started. But Pauline's tests are normal: her symptoms seem to have no physical cause whatsoever. This may be an extreme case, but Pauline is not alone. As many as a third of people visiting their GPs have symptoms that are medically unexplained.

The (Honest) Truth about Dishonesty: How We Lie to Everyone - Especially Ourselves

Fascinating and provocative, Dan Ariely's The (Honest) Truth about Dishonesty is an insightful and brilliantly researched take on cheating, deception, and willpower. The internationally best-selling author pulls no punches when it comes to home truths. His previous titles Predictably Irrational and The Upside of Irrationality have become classics in their field, revealing astonishing traits that run through modern humankind. Now acclaimed behavioural economist Dan Ariely delves deeper into psychology.

Empire of Things: How We Became a World of Consumers, from the Fifteenth Century to the Twenty-First

What we consume has become the defining feature of our lives: our economies live or die by spending, we are treated more as consumers than workers and even public services are presented to us as products in a supermarket. In this monumental study, acclaimed historian Frank Trentmann unfolds the extraordinary history that has shaped our material world, from late Ming China, Renaissance Italy and the British Empire to the present.

Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions

All our lives are constrained by limited space and time, limits that give rise to a particular set of problems. What should we do, or leave undone, in a day or a lifetime? How much messiness should we accept? What balance of new activities and familiar favorites is the most fulfilling? These may seem like uniquely human quandaries, but they are not: computers, too, face the same constraints, so computer scientists have been grappling with their version of such problems for decades.

Sprint: How to solve big problems and test new ideas in just five days

Entrepreneurs and leaders face big questions every day. How should you be focusing your efforts? What will your idea look like in real life? How do you start? How many meetings and discussions does it take before you can be sure you've got the right solution? Now there's a surefire way to answer these important questions: the sprint.

Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets

This audiobook is about luck, or more precisely, how we perceive and deal with luck in life and business. It is already a landmark work, and its title has entered our vocabulary. In its second edition, Fooled by Randomness is now a cornerstone for anyone interested in random outcomes.

The Economics of Inequality

Succinct, accessible, and authoritative, Thomas Piketty's The Economics of Inequality is the ideal place to start for those who want to understand the fundamental issues at the heart of one the most pressing concerns in contemporary economics and politics. This work now appears in English for the first time.

Publisher's Summary

Ever since Adam Smith, the central teaching of economics has been that free markets provide us with material well-being, as if by an invisible hand. In Phishing for Phools, Nobel Prize-winning economists George Akerlof and Robert Shiller deliver a fundamental challenge to this insight, arguing that markets harm as well as help us.

As long as there is profit to be made, sellers will systematically exploit our psychological weaknesses and our ignorance through manipulation and deception. Rather than being essentially benign and always creating the greater good, markets are inherently filled with tricks and traps and will "phish" us as "phools".

Phishing for Phools therefore strikes a radically new direction in economics based on the intuitive idea that markets both give and take away. Akerlof and Shiller bring this idea to life through dozens of stories that show how phishing affects everyone in almost every walk of life. We spend our money up to the limit and then worry about how to pay the next month's bills. The financial system soars then crashes. We are attracted, more than we know, by advertising. Our political system is distorted by money. We pay too much for gym memberships, cars, houses, and credit cards. Drug companies ingeniously market pharmaceuticals that do us little good and sometimes are downright dangerous.

Phishing for Phools explores the central role of manipulation and deception in fascinating detail in each of these areas and many more. It thereby explains a paradox: why, at a time when we are better off than ever before in history, all too many of us are leading lives of quiet desperation. At the same time, the book tells stories of individuals who have stood against economic trickery - and how it can be reduced through greater knowledge, reform, and regulation.

The authors explain with a very long list of examples how free market is bound to exploit our weakness.The book is not well structured in my opinion and the dull narration makes it hard to keep interest.

They make a strong case for why the free market requires regulation to prevent market crashes and the likes.

2 of 2 people found this review helpful

Phil O.

San Diego, CA, United States

29/02/16

Overall

Performance

Story

"Useful for a certain audience, but ..."

As an econ buff and a business law professor, I think I have seen most everything here, slightly different terminology. I have recommended this book to several friends and acquaintances not as versed as I am in this field. I have not all seen these topics all in one place, and at this popular level. But what I call "different terminology," points to gaps here which puzzle me. For example, the classical law of fraud, for centuries, has dealt head-on with minimum boundaries and outlines of factual truthfulness required in arm's-length deals. This law provides an elegant framework that allows for the (widely known) situation that sales people and negotiators play more loosely with matters of mere opinion, versus tighter strictures on claims of fact. This fuzziness is everywhere in our consumer world, and people deserve to be sharply educated about it. But they are not educated about it, in its classical language and concepts, here. This overflight, if you will, is puzzling. Business people, lawyers, and drafters of laws have followed these contours in countless instances, and I see this as basic as arithmetic is to learning and thinking about higher math. On a wider scale, each and every contract is a micro-equilibrium reached between crossing representations of both parties, so there is a sort of "phishing equilibrium" element (without the new term here used). These are fundamental to this field, reenacted at some level in every contract, meaning millions per day. The paucity of treatment here of the basic rules of fraud and legal factual standards is astonishing to me. Yes, indirect allusions are made, but not in any clear way. Similarly, the concept of information asymmetry is at the foundation of understanding these situations, and this gets some mention, but mostly obliquely. This reminds me of a statistics book I read where the author tried to re-name everything, but the new content substantively didn't seem as novel or informative as it claimed to be. (And some print real estate in this book is devoted to how different and special and needed this boo's approach is. I somewhat agree, if reaching a new audience is the aim.) I agree that public policy makers and citizens should know this stuff, and sadly, victimizations large and small are visible all around us in everyday consumer life, not to mention, at the scale of big finance and politics. People who are not bright or well-informed are always with us, in droves. So this book does fill a need, though the particular people being blind-sided in real life are unlikely to read this. (Sadly, as in teaching, the people present and focusing on my best content are the ones who least need it, and the ones drifting off and absent need most urgently to hear what I am saying.) So a lot of this content may wind up as "preaching to the choir," as it was to me. Then again, I make an explicit professional focus on things like complex consumer contracts, so I'm not average. Also, listening to this, my mind would toss up counter-ideas I would like to flesh out about the virtues of market discipline and so on, rather than the curt and fairly rote dismissals here. I do admire that Robert Shiller has repeatedly extolled the praises of finance and free markets, so he gets points for that, and has kept me in his audience, versus the lopsided drivel I hear from both extremes, in books and elsewhere. But as to market discipline: some people are patently so little interested in protecting their own interests that they perhaps deserve the just desserts of their indolence. We really can't afford a government that will pick up after every lazy slob who doesn't care about himself or bettering his sharpness as a dealmaker. If some loll around on the beach and then expect someone to appear to magically protect them ex post, and at no cost, as many Americans seem to, perhaps they are begging for a harsh lesson. I realize, in defense of the authors' approach here, apologists for free markets are not in short supply. I am a great admirer of Robert Shiller in particular and will continue to read his books.

6 of 8 people found this review helpful

Francisco J Orozco

24/08/16

Overall

Performance

Story

"Narrator is terrible"

Economics is a bland subject to begin with. The narrator's tone and inability to pace his reading does nothing to help. I listen to audiobooks on similar subjects and I have never come across one I couldn't finish until now. It almost sounds like a computer narration. Don't waste your money or your free credit if you have one.

1 of 1 people found this review helpful

GoRangers

Mendham, NJ USA

26/02/16

Overall

Performance

Story

"Implodes the Keynesian Invisible Hand Myth"

Equilibrium theory that injects reality into how the sophisticated phish the naive in most of not all industries

2 of 3 people found this review helpful

Bash Q.

10/11/16

Overall

Performance

Story

"More History Than Revelation"

Any additional comments?

I have great respect for Robert J. Shiller. His Yale lectures gave me greater understanding and entirely new respect and perspective on our financial systems. This was not a bad book. But it was not the book I was expecting. There's a lot of very interesting history on some of the biggest financial scandals of the last century. There's some roughly explained concepts of human and social psychology. All interesting enough. But I felt it was greatly lacking in offering solutions to the problems it outlined. Lots of examples of things that were wrong. Some examples of people that made changes for the good. But as for practical advice for us, the general public for whom the book is supposed to help, it boiled down to... educate yourself.

I guess based on the critical reviews I was expecting a revelation and just got a, albeit interesting but not terribly profound, history lesson.

Also as a technical criticism, the reader's voice was easily tuned out and at times, particularly in the beginning, he sounded almost robotic.

0 of 0 people found this review helpful

Howard

San Diego, CA United States

07/09/16

Overall

Performance

Story

"Could Not Finish the Book"

Much too simplistic. The authors use obvious mistakes as their foils. The authors are very smart; this book is not.

0 of 0 people found this review helpful

Pablo

06/08/16

Overall

Performance

Story

"An OK book, interesting but lacking in places"

This seemed to me like a perfunctory effort from two Nobel Prize-winning economists trying to churn out another book together. I understand and sharesome of the theoretical insights, but they are mostly neither new nor particularly insightful. The political bias is clearly visible, I was a little disappointed.

0 of 1 people found this review helpful

Leslie

25/05/16

Overall

Performance

Story

"The phools are the readers."

The authors are schills for the nanny state. They point out real problems, but their solutons are failed snake oil remedies.

0 of 4 people found this review helpful

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